The purpose of the proposed studies is to evaluate how emotional tone of voice affects the perception of word and sentence meaning. Traditionally, the study of emotional tone of voice has been considered separately from the study of the formal linguistic content of spoken language. On the one hand, researchers have focused on how listeners detect anger, sadness, happiness, etc., in an individual's voice. On the other hand, considerable research has focused on how listeners perceive the formal linguistic aspects, the syllables, words, and phrases, of spoken language. Little research has been done, however, on how these two types of information interact during spoken language communication. The proposed studies address this gap by investigating how linguistic information and emotional tone of voice are integrated and used by the perceiver during spoken language communication. Five experiments are proposed that will concentrate on two specific stages in language processing: I) lexical access and spoken word recognition, and 2) sentence comprehension. The proposed research will first test whether an emotional tone of voice that is congruent or incongruent with word meaning can affect the nature and time course of word recognition. Transcription of emotional homophones, lexical decision, and naming paradigms will be used. Second, the proposed research will examine whether tone of voice can influence the perception of larger units of speech. Listeners will rate the affective meaning of sentences in which emotional tone of voice is either consistent or inconsistent with the affective meaning of the sentence. The goal is to determine at what stage of analysis emotional voice information is integrated into a listener's interpretation of an utterance. Most theories assume that the evaluation of the talker's emotional state is carried out independently of linguistic analysis and may only be taken into consideration after linguistic processing is complete. Language comprehension is assumed to consist of a series of processing stages in which abstract, context-free units are extracted from the speech stream and used to access abstract, symbolic linguistic representations. Surface characteristics of an utterance are assumed to be discarded. The results of the proposed studies will directly address this common theoretical assumption by uncovering the interplay during perception of linguistic information and emotional tone of voice.